


a story for girls, and how it ended

by greenbirds



Category: Winterlong - Elizabeth Hand
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 18:48:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/298893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenbirds/pseuds/greenbirds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the Festival of Winterlong, and the oldest tales are told to the youngest Paphians.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a story for girls, and how it ended

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rm (arem)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arem/gifts).



> Many thanks to the Usual Suspect for the awesome beta of great awesomeness.

The winter after my bedwarming, the snow drifted deep on the broad marble steps of House Miramar, and the cold of the bright star-flecked night was so deep and piercing that none ventured forth to the Masque of Winterlong, lest the brightest of the Magdalene's children meet the fate of those elders, who, tired of slops and labor and slow withering, would lay down to sleep in the snows under the watchful eyes of Orion and the scorpion who forever pursued him.

The halls of Saint-Alaban were hung with fragrant evergreen boughs and almost untenanted; were a sweet voice to demand, "Who will let the winter in," only a handful of voices and the howl of the icy wind would answer.

It was to have been my first Winterlong, the first time that I set foot on Saint-Alaban's Hill, the first time I laid eyes on the great ORPHEUS and danced hand-in-hand with my beautiful cousins. I was to have been gilded head-to-toe, my skin sparkling with priceless flecks of gold, and my hair garlanded with blood-bright holly berries. For weeks, I had lain in bed in the darkness imagining inlaid floors and soaring ceilings and flickering candles. I imagined masquers like bright moths in red and green and gold gliding through air heavy with hempen smoke and the sharp bright smell of pine resin.

But instead the snow and the killing cold had come, and my finery lay packed away somewhere in the great House.

The Saint-Alabans would no doubt say that it was a bad omen for Winter in her finery to stride through the City of Trees unanswered on the longest night of the year, but perhaps it didn't matter so much in a city watched over by an empty Obelisk and the Engulfed Cathedral that crouched like a malevolent Sphinx on its high hill. The Sorrowful Lincoln and the Narrow Forest and the Botanical Garden would still be there when the sun rose on the morrow and transformed the snow into a thousand glittering diamond flecks.

 _Who will let the winter in?_

Not I, not I.

The elders huddled in the dark kitchen, wrapped in scraps of wool and rags of faded brocade, warming their rough and bony hands over the coals in the stove. I had crept to the kitchen door of a night and seen them there, passing a brown bottle with a broken lip among themselves, and whispering in voices like withered butterflies' wings scattered among autumn leaves.

 _I was crowned cacique at the Masque of Owls the year that Miriam Helen broke her neck falling from a balcony at High Brazil._

 _My hair was once the color of spun amber, and two Zoologists fought a duel for my affections._

(Retching, I had turned away.)

That Winterlong I huddled with my bedcousins on the threadbare rug before the fire in Old Doctor Foster's study, watching the sweet smoke from his narghile curl slowly toward the ceiling before it disappeared into the cobweb-edged shadows. The rug had once been something fine, edged in scrollwork of crimson and gold, and with a scene of Oliphants with their great tusks marching across its vast expanse. But it had been worn thin and smooth and faded by countless little feet and little hands, and now the Oliphants were, as Doctor Foster's stories, little more than a pale dream-image, almost more imagined than seen.

"I want a story for girls," Ketura demanded. She was pressed, shivering, against my side, all elbows and sharp thin ribs. Her fine woolen shift, a gift from the thick-lipped Zoologist Francis Wolf, who had engaged her at the Butterfly Ball, was hardly sufficient defense against the cold. Ketura was nearly two full summers old than I and almost too old to sit before the fire demanding tales. But she was flame-haired and pale-skinned, and Doctor Foster liked for my pretty bedcousin to perch upon his knee.

Doctor Foster smiled a little at her sharp tone. "A story for girls, is it?" he asked. "I think I might perhaps know one." He drew from his pipe, and blew a slow, thick plume of smoke toward the ceiling. "It's even a story with a happy ending, in honor of the longest night."

On my other side, Little Henrik exhaled a puff of steam into the chilly air, imitating him, and at Dr. Foster's reproving look, he settled meekly against me, sighing softly. My little cousin smelled of attar of roses and his fingers were sticky with the juice of the orange he'd cadged from the suzein as a Midwinter treat.

"In the heart of the Narrow Forest," Doctor Foster began, "lived an aardman."

"That's not a story for girls," Little Henrik protested. "It's got an aardman in it."

"Have patience," said Dr. Foster, around another plume of smoke. "The girl comes later. Her name was Violet High Brazil, and she was more beautiful even then our darling Raphael here." He smiled affectionately at me. "But that's in the middle of the story. First I have to tell you about the aardman."

This particular aardman, said Doctor Foster, had tall pointed ears edged in dark fur, and a wide white stripe that bisected his long muzzle, and he affected to wear wire-rimmed spectacles as a Curator might, though his spectacles had no glass in them, and they would have done him no good in any case, seeing as his bright amber eyes were not in the same place as a person's eyes would be. For Grim had grown up watching the Botanists from the deep shadows of the forest's edge as they went about their business, and he fancied that if he could wear what they wore and put on the seeming of their ways, he might become as one of them.

"I know this story," a girl said behind me. I don't know if it was Lily or Rose, and I didn't turn around to see. "It's an awful story. I don't like it."

"Oh, sweetheart," said Doctor Foster, and his voice was gentle, almost sad. "This is the happiest story I know. When you're older, you'll understand that." Doctor Foster was the oldest person I had ever seen; almost forty, but he still tied his thinning braid with a bright brocade riband. I wondered if he had once been as pretty as Ketura or Little Henrik, if Patrons had once flocked to his bed.

Beside me, Ketura stirred. "Well, _I_ want to hear the rest of it." Ketura had always been the bravest of all of us, and she was Doctor Foster's favorite.

"A young lady of discerning taste indeed," he said. "Now, shall we return to our tale?" He took a breath. "Most aardmen, as the Curators are happy to tell us, sleep in dens, like their cousins the dogs..."

But Grim, so Doctor Foster said, lived in a little yellow house in a clearing in the Narrow Forest, on the edge of a little copse of carnivorous betulamia, which are like slender birches and as graceful as the dancers at an Illyrian masque. This is only a disguise, like the seemings we put on for this masque or that; fall asleep in the shadow of the betulamia and you will never awaken; your flesh will become meals for worms and ravens.

The little yellow house had curtains at the windows, and tidy clapboard sides, and a wide porch with two little chairs, and before it belonged to Grim, said Doctor Foster, it belonged to Ivy Quercus, a Botanist who left the comparative safety of the botanical gardens (with its horrors both familiar and exotic - nightshade and foxglove and pitcher plants and a tall willow that snatched birds in midflight with slender lashing branches) to study the things that grew in the Narrow Forest. At fifty, she was ancient as the very stones, and as mad, after years of green solitude, as a starvation-crazed lazar. When Grim wandered through her garden gate on a rainy spring afternoon, she welcomed him in and offered him tea and tincture of opium.

Now the skull of Ivy Quercus hung on a gilded hook outside the cheerful front door of the little yellow house, with twin candles in its eyesockets. It was a handsome lantern, and bright.

And it was to this little house in the forest, Doctor Foster told us, that Violet High Brazil would eventually come. But first he had to tell us about the garden of Grim the aardman.

The garden belonged to Ivy Quercus first, of course, and before the aardman with his sable-edged ears moved into the little yellow house, it had been all neat rows of bright coneflowers and hearts' ease and the startling orange of poppies, and in the springtime, it was filled with bushes and vines burgeoning with bright berries and smooth curving squash and lumpy, misshapen gourds. Grim transformed it, filled it with treasures he had collected in the uncertain twilight that always followed the rains of roses.

In place of the nodding poppies and the prosaic abundance of vegetables, now there were clusters of sun-yellow daffodils that sang with the voices of children, and snowy narcissus with tiny pearly teeth, and carpets of violets with tiny, hungry mouths that snapped at the fat hairy bees that buzzed, half-drunk, among the sweet blossoms. Ivy's ancient apple trees groaned under the weight of agarics so orange they seared the vision and dryad saddles that were as blue as the wing of a morpha butterfly and warm and pulsing like fat human flesh, and their branches were festooned with narcotic streamers of night coil.

It was a garden of strange delights, but the flowers that Grim prized above all others were his roses. They were not the deadly roses that guard the greenhouses of the Botanists where the wormwood and the bright opium poppies flourish, not geneslave plants that can stop the heart of a grown man with one swift sharp scratch of a shining black thorn, but merely ordinary blooms whose names were a slender bright road reaching back into the lost dark time before the First Ascension: Omar Khayaam and Professor Emile Perrot, Leda and Adam and Belle Amour. Grim had stolen the denizens of this floral menagerie from the gardens of the Embassies, from the wild thickets around the stone ruins of the Library of Conquest, even from the Botanists themselves, who had cursed him and shot at him with swivel guns and called him a cur, and he tended his roses as the suzein of a great House might tend his most beautiful catamite.

And most precious all of Grim's roses, said Doctor Foster, was a tiny plant he had taken from an Ascendant whose unwary train had unwisely strayed into the forest at twilight. Certainly, they would no longer miss the little plant with perfect emerald leaves, whose silver blossoms opened once each year when Orion the Hunter rose over the midwinter snow, and crumbled into black dust before the rising of the sun.

It was into this rose garden that came Violet High Brazil, the loveliest of all the Paphian children on the Hill Magdalena Ardent, on a summer afternoon that was heavy with heat and the buzzing of bees and the low drone of the wings of the shining beetles that fed on the rotting trees that fell in the forest shadows. Now normally such a lovely child, with her alabaster skin and her coils of violet-black hair and her small soft hands, would never stray far from the minarets of her House, and certainly she would never wander into the Narrow Forest alone, but the suzein of House High Brazil lay desperately ill, and Violet had come to trade with the old woman Ivy Quercus for the rare tincture that might cure him.

Ivy Quercus, as Doctor Foster said in his voice like old oiled mahogany, was quite mad, and cared nothing for any of the things that my people might normally trade for a vial of precious medicine: not for brocade or bright-feathered guineafowl or heavy shining bangles such as those given to us by the Curators who dwelt in the Hall of Civil servants; not even for the favors of a delicate pathic or a little mopsy or a tall angular dominatrix with a whip of braided leather. No, the mad old woman cared for none of those things, but those who traded with her knew that she would accept a braid of glossy dark hair from the most beautiful of the Magdalene's children, and so Violet went. Alone, for all she had spent precious little time in the world outside her House, because the old woman always demanded it.

Violet's dearest bedcousin was Iphigenia High Brazil, who had dwelt among the Zoologists for a season and knew something of the world that lay jumbled at the foot of the Hill Magdalena Ardent, and when she wrapped Violet in a cloak of heavy crimson wool and pulled the hood up around Violet's face to shadow her delicate beauty, Iphigenia warned her cousin, "Go straight to the little yellow house of Ivy Quercus, and do not stray from the road. Do not stop to look at the little blue blossoms that tinkle like bells, and do not sing with the daffodils."

Violet High Brazil was a good girl, and a compliant one, and she said, "No, cousin, of course I will not."

"And most especially," said Iphigenia sternly, "do not speak with any of the creatures that dwell in the Narrow Forest. They are lovely, yes, and they will seem soft and harmless, but I promise you cousin, they are not."

"No, cousin, of course I will not," promised Violet High Brazil, and she went forth into the Narrow Forest to the little yellow house, and through the garden gate made of willow twigs woven into spirals and sunbursts and the graceful shapes of birds, and there she found Grim the aardman tending his roses. He smiled at her -- the way a dog might smile, or a wolf -- with bright white teeth and lolling tongue, and she turned as if to run.

"Wait," said Grim. "Wait, little sister. Stay here in the garden and talk to me for a while."

"My cousin said I was not to speak to the creatures of the Narrow Forest," replied Violet, her hand on the latch of the little garden gate.

"But this is not the Narrow Forest," Grim said, in a soothing voice filled with warmth and sunlight. "this is the garden of Ivy Quercus. And I am no creature," he added. "See? I wear spectacles and trousers and shoes, and I tend the old woman's garden."

At this, Violet High Brazil looked a little bit relieved, and she threw back the hood of her fine crimson cloak, and she said that she had come to find the Botanist Ivy Quercus, and might Grim carry her message to the old woman?

"I fear that my mistress is not home today, my lovely child," said Grim the aardman, "but if you will stay and help me tend my roses, I will find whatever it is that you have come for, and send you home safe before nightfall."

"I am to leave a braid of my hair for the Botanist," Violet told him. "Bound round with a silver ribbon. I suppose that she does not have to cut it with her own hands."

Grim paused, his hands full of heavy fragrant blooms, and smiled at her again. "I could never deprive so lovely a girl of her shining hair," he said. "I shall give you whatever it is you seek, and you shall say instead to your people that you gave my mistress a drop of blood to feed her most precious rose."

"But that is not what my suzein promised to her," said Violet, who was, after all, a very good girl.

"No," agreed Grim, "and perhaps my mistress will beat me, but I cannot send you home to your high Hill less beautiful than you are now."

"Thank you," said Violet, who was a very good girl, but was so vain of her lustrous blue-black hair that she had wept when she was told of the Botanist's price, even if it was to save the life of her dear suzein. And so she sat in the garden for the rest of the honey-gold afternoon, while Grim the aardman pinched spent buds from his roses and told her of the plants that flourished in the shadowy places. And when twilight began gathering at the edges of the sky, Grim led her up to the wide porch of the little yellow house and gave her the cut-glass bottle of tincture she had come for, and sent her on her way.

"That is a fine lantern you have, Sieur Aardman," Violet said of the clean white skull on its little gilded hook.

"Thank you, my dear," Grim said, tongue lolling. "It is one of my very favorite things about this little yellow house. And now you should be on your way. Strange things wait for little mopsies who are caught in the Narrow Forest after the sun goes down."

So little Violet High Brazil went down the gravel path to the garden gate, and just before she passed back out into the shadows of the forest, she called over her shoulder, "What was that little plant with the emerald leaves? I have never seen its like before, not even on Saint-Alaban's Hill."

"Come back on the day of the Masque of Owls, and I will tell you," Grim called back to her. "Now off with you, before the moths and the night coil make a meal of you. Not all the plants you find here are as tame as mine."

By Autime, the suzein of House High Brazil was well again, and so grateful to his lovely little Violet for his cure that he traded with Curators and Zoologists and even the Ascendant janissaries who passed along the borders of the City of Trees so that he might give her the most splendid finery to wear at the Masque of Owls: cloth-of-gold, and brocade the color of new-spilled blood, bangles of silver and gold and heavy dull lead studded with rubies and peridots and tiny chips of diamond, a mask made of fragile moths' wings with their iridescent eyespots and the tiny shining feathers of the kingfishers that hunted along the river's edge.

Violet High Brazil had not forgotten the aardman's kindness or his promise, and in the chaos of palanquins and Patrons and bright-garbed Paphians and Senators in their sober robes, she slipped away from the Masque of Owls and down the winding road to the little yellow house in the Narrow Forest.

"You did not forget me!" Grim cried with delight when he saw her coming down the garden path in her splendid costume, velvet ribbons of red and gold braided through her shining hair. "And I have not forgotten my promise to you."

And Violet slipped her slim white hand into his great golden-furred one, and said, "Lead on, Sieur Aardman," and let Grim take her through the fields of strange flowers and into the rose garden with its low stone walls.

Most of the roses were nothing more than sticks of green and brown adorned with thorns, naked and pruned back to wait through Autime and the winter snows for the return of spring, but the little bush with the emerald leaves still thrived. Grim led her to where it grew, rooted in a pot with glaze that shone like opals in the weak late-afternoon sun, and he showed her the single tiny bud that sprouted from its crown.

"This is an Ascendant rose, a magic thing. Its bloom is silver, and it blooms only under the stars of Winterlong. By the time the sun returns, it crumbles into dust."

"I would like to see such a thing," Violet High Brazil said, peering at the tiny bud.

"Return to the garden and wait with me while the moon rises at Winterlong, and I will show you the silver rose," Grim promised. "And when the moon is high, my dear, I will give you a great secret, so that your beauty shall never fade, and you will never grow old." To never watch in the mirror as her hair turned gray and her cheeks sank and crows' feet blossomed around her eyes, to never draw a palanquin with swollen, work-roughened hands, to never sit in the rain while her lovely cousins danced the opening pavane at a masque: it was such a promise as no child of the Magdalene could refuse.

And then the aardman with his spectacles and his great amber eyes said that Violet High Brazil should not tarry too long in the garden of the little yellow house, lest her bright-garbed and beribboned friends miss her at the Masque of Owls, and he dropped octine into her bright eyes, and laid a wreath of delicate golden flowers that sighed and laughed with the sweet voices of Paphian women atop her shining hair, and that night she was crowned cacique of the masque, and her bedcousins carried her home on their shoulders.

None of the Magdalene's children have ever had so many Patrons as did pretty Violet High Brazil in the weeks that followed the Masque of Owls. Zoologists brought her fine leather gloves trimmed in hummingbird feathers, Curators brought her delicate titanium ear cuffs trimmed with tiny gemstone beads, and Senators laid velvet ribbons and bunches of rare flowers at her feet.

And on the afternoon of the Masque of Winterlong, the elders wove ribbons of velvet through Violet's hair and tied tiny silver bells hardly larger than mustard seeds into the ends of her braids, and laced her into a brocade gown heavy with gold embroidery and trimmed with a hundred ermine tails. Her bedcousin Iphigenia brought her delicate gold slippers and painted her eyes with kohl and gold, and kissed her on the lips.

"You are more beautiful than any of us, cousin," said Iphigenia, and Violet High Brazil smiled, thinking of the aardman's secret promise.

When the revelers made their way up the broad avenue to the great marble-columned house on the hill, hands full of evergreen boughs and holly and bright flickering candles redolent of beeswax, Violet High Brazil slipped away into the shadows and the snow.

( **Hang the boy and raise the girl 'til Winterlong is broken** )

She reached the gate of the little yellow house just as the sun dropped below the outstretched black arms of the naked trees. Light spilled from the windows, and the rail that encircled the porch was heaped high with gilded pinecones and sharp-sweet evergreen branches.

At the soft slippered footstep on the gravel path, Grim turned from where he stood on a little wooden ladder, lighting the candles in the eyes of the little white skull, his soft pointed ears swiveling, and scented the wind.

"I did not forget you," said Violet High Brazil.

"And I have not forgotten my promise," said Grim the Aardman.

They dined that night at the carven maple table in the little yellow house, feasting on peafowl and little roasted finches, on new winter tubers, and the last of Autime's golden apples, roasted with cinnamon and spices, and the aardman with the golden fur laid a tiny wooden box in her hand. Inside the box was a hair ornament in the shape of a tiny, perfect holly leaf, trimmed in gold and encrusted with emeralds, and Grim set it carefully in her shining hair, his claws ticking her scalp.

"I did not bring you anything," Violet High Brazil said. She was, after all, a very good girl, and kind besides.

"That's all right," said the aardman, adjusting his spectacles.

And then pretty little Violet smiled suddenly, and pulled a red ribbon from her braid, and tied it in a bow around his throat, and kissed the aardman shyly on the cheek. "Your fur is so soft," she said.

Grim stroked the velvet with a careful finger, and smiled in the manner of dogs, and they sat before the fire in silence for a time.

"The moon is rising," Grim said. "It is time."

He led her out into the bright snow-lit night, and though the break in the little stone wall, and into the rose garden, where alone of all its inhabitants, the little rose bush burgeoned with bright leaves, and sagged just a bit under the weight of its single heavy blossom.

"See?" Grim said in a soft voice. "It was only waiting for Winterlong."

And Violet High Brazil, heedless of her Midwinter finery, dropped to her knees in the snow in front of the rose bush and its single heavy blossom.

She touched it with gentle, wondering fingers. "It looks like real silver," she said, her breath ghosting in the frigid air; and indeed, it shone in the pale moonlight like one of her bedcousin's bracelets of bright tinkling silver bells.

"It will be gone before the sun rises," Grim said. "It will crumble into black dust, and blow away as if it never was."

"It's so beautiful," Violet said, turning her head to look at him. The tiny bells in her hair chimed and sang. "And so sad."

"Indeed," said the aardman gently, moving to stand behind her. Iphigenia had warned her pretty bedcousin to beware the creatures of the Narrow Forest, but Grim was gentle and kind, and his fur was redolent of spices. "It is always sad when beauty fades."

"But beauty always fades," said Violet, thinking of the elders who braided ribbons into her hair and slipped the bangles onto her arms. One of them was Juliana High Brazil who was once the favorite of a Regent, and who now carried slops from the kitchen for the chickens to dine on.

"Oh," said Grim, stroking her shining braid gently. "But I have promised you the greatest of my secrets."

"So that my beauty will never fade," murmured Violet High Brazil, but her eyes were on the rose, which stretched out delicate petals to touch the moonbeams.

"Behold," said the aardman, "I bring you good tidings of great joy." And he drew a bright steel knife from the folds of his vest, and slit her throat.

The blood of Violet High Brazil pattered to the snow like a rain of roses, and she fell slowly backwards, her eyes wide and staring at the stars overhead, and the moon in its rising.

With the little knife, Grim cut the silver rose, and placed it gently between her half-parted lips.

"Now you will never grow old," he told her, and kissed her gently on the forehead, and went back inside the little yellow house.

When the sun rose the next morning and the revelers wound their unsteady way down Saint-Alaban's Hill, arm in arm and hand in hand, the winter clouds blew in up the river, and covered the aardman's garden in a blanket of forgetful snow.

"And so," said Doctor Foster, as the fire burned down to slow-smoking embers, "Violet High Brazil never became an elder."

Against my side, I could feel pretty Ketura sobbing, her sharp ribs heaving. Mechanically, I put my arms around her and made soothing noises and pressed my lips against the top of her head. "You are wicked, Doctor Foster," she said through her tears. "Oh, wicked, wicked Doctor Foster. That wasn't a nice story at all."

And Ketura turned her head so that just for a moment, the dim reddish light from the fire illuminated the planes of her face, and I could see that her cheeks were no longer soft and apple-round like Little Henrik's. I knew suddenly that by next Winterlong, my pretty bedcousin's narrow body would wear the beginnings of a woman's curves. Before any of us knew it, she would be eighteen, and her soft fingers would be calloused and her smooth cheeks spangled with freckles.

I held Ketura close, smelling hemp smoke and lilacs. I wanted to tell her that Doctor Foster was right after all: it _was_ a happy ending. But I knew, even though she was two summers older than I, that she would not understand, and so I held my tongue.

~.*.~


End file.
